Arlington

December 5, 2025

Dear all,

This week at the administrative and staff forums and the faculty meeting, we presented the latest plans and thinking regarding the future redevelopment of Arlington. Because not everyone was able to attend these meetings, I wanted to provide an update, including addressing concerns raised in a recent Miscellany News article.

This Arlington initiative seeks to collaborate with everyone in our community–all of us who live, work, study, and own businesses here–to enable Arlington to continue to be a thriving and livable neighborhood for many years to come.

We are working together to imagine a vibrant redevelopment that maintains the historic character and welcoming feel of the area and prioritizes additional affordable housing that will be attractive to Vassar employees and community residents. It will also include significant investments in existing local businesses to help them prosper and to attract new ones to our neighborhood, including potentially a movie theatre and event spaces.

As future phases of this initiative unfold, we want to support existing local business owners to find viable space–and continued revenue–for their businesses while buildings they now inhabit are being replaced. We also want to help residential tenants, who may eventually be affected, feel secure in knowing they will have positive, new options for continuing to call our community home.

This work will take time and we will continue to seek community input. In January and April of this year, we convened two community workshops that included faculty, students, administrators, local government officials, local business owners and local community representatives, and we fielded a survey to gather community feedback. These community engagement efforts will continue to help shape future plans.

We apologize to members of the community–small businesses and residential tenants in the spaces we have acquired–who expressed that we have not given them adequate opportunity to engage in the process. Our intent is community partnership. Communication is key, and Vassar will reach out directly to current tenants to hear and address their concerns.

Moving forward, there will be many more opportunities for public comment, and we will provide regular updates as we approach milestones during the next phases of this process. Thank you for your ideas and engagement in this important work. As always, be in touch if you have questions or concerns.

Elizabeth H. Bradley, President
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY 12604
@EHBVassar